A continuing trend in semiconductor technology is to build integrated circuits with more and/or faster semiconductor devices. As is often the case, however, as the devices shrink in size from one generation to the next, some of the existing fabrication techniques are not precise enough to be used in fabricating the next generation of integrated circuit devices. For example, spacers are used in conventional semiconductor devices to provide alignment of the source and drain regions to the gates in transistors. Minor differences in the uniformity and shape of the spacers can alter the operational characteristics of the device.